Editorial by Rep. Frank: Social conservatives stopped online gaming bill
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Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who introduced the defeated House bill that tried to stop the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement from being implemented, wrote an editorial about why the bill was defeated in an editorial at the online news site, The Huffington Post.
The House bill, HR 5767, failed to make it out of committee last week.
Frank wrote that social conservatives were responsible for the bill’s defeat, saying there are more in legislating against the behavior of gambling than working with a law, the UIGEA, which has proven to be impossible for the government to implement in reality.
Here is some of what Frank wrote:
On the other side were the various conservative social and religious groups who voted that adults should be protected from themselves by banning gambling. Democrats on the Committee were overwhelmingly on the side of their Republican Colleague, Peter King (who introduced an amendment to the bill), and voted 29 to 4 in favor of the King amendment. Before the meeting, various members of the economic interest groups that were supporting that amendment had expected to get a significant number of Republican votes as well. But then the religious right and their allies stepped in. As a result, a number of Republicans who had committed to vote for the bill switched their votes, and the final vote on the Republican side was 28 in favor of insisting that Treasury and the Federal Reserve impose these stringent and intrusive regulations, and only 3 against it. Combining the overwhelming Democratic vote in favor and the even more overwhelming Republican vote against produced a tie - 32 to 32, and in this game, a tie means that the amendment is defeated.
Frank goes on to write that this shows the power of religious conservatives have over fiscal conservatives in today’s Congress, and that he regrets the bill became a partisan issue.
